Great Western Coffee Shop

First, I've put this here as, for some reason I can't post a new item in "The Wider Picture"

Apparently if services are cancelled before 10pm the day before, they not counted in official figures or towards Delay Repay...

Which is fair enough frankly - but yes, it ought to be at least 48 hours out, not previous night IMO. Otherwise no TOC would ever publish a 'normal' timetable, but add in services each week to get to a 'proper' timetable.

If they weren't permitted, they'd be heavily fined every time adverse weather affected services, which no TOC would accept as a fair contract term

First, I've put this here as, for some reason I can't post a new item in "The Wider Picture"

Apparently if services are cancelled before 10pm the day before, they not counted in official figures or towards Delay Repay...

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/revealed-north-of-england-train-line-vastly-under-reports-cancellations/ar-AA14BJ5Z?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=19817c15f55742968b69d0ba1236709a

Weather-related cancellations excepted. IMHO

Rail firms are using loopholes to axe thousands of services without officially recording them – after selling travellers tickets for the cancelled ‘ghost trains’.

A record 314,000 were dropped in the year to October 15, the Office of Road and Rail has admitted – but that figure does not include those hit by strikes, lost in ‘amended’ timetables or cancelled before 10pm the night before.

Veteran rail expert Christian Wolmar revealed the ruse, explaining: ‘I had a ticket for an 8am King’s Cross train – I looked on the station noticeboard and it wasn’t there. The man said there is no 8am train and I said I have a ticket for it. It was always on the timetable but it had become a phantom train.’

He said of the official figure – 3.8 per cent of services across the country: ‘I can’t remember such a high figure but it’s irrelevant because it only represents cancellations on the day.’

19 January 2023
The Office of Rail and Road has today written to the rail industry outlining the need to change how they record ‘pre-cancellations’ and to introduce a more passenger-friendly and transparent way of working when making late changes to services.

Passengers using many parts of the GB rail network are suffering from poor performance.

Train cancellations are at record levels, and an ORR investigation confirmed a further gap between cancellations statistics and the passenger experience.

This was driven by an increased number of unrecorded ‘pre-cancellations’.

Such ‘pre-cancellations’ (via a process known as ‘p-coding') can be confirmed as late as 22:00 the previous evening and are not included in the timetables that railway performance statistics are measured against.

For a passenger this could mean that a train they expected to catch when they went to bed can disappear from the timetable by the time they leave for the station unaware that the train has been cancelled.

Historically such changes have been made to support the introduction of emergency timetables when poor weather or infrastructure damage has required a whole-scale change to train service on a route. Service performance is measured against the published replacement (emergency) timetable instead.

The regulator finds that over the last year this mechanism has been used differently.

Late changes have been made to timetables by withdrawing services when insufficient staff or no appropriate trains are available. ORR says this is an inappropriate application of the Network Code’s provisions on emergency timetables.

ORR has today written to all train companies telling them to stop using this inappropriate approach and to ask Network Rail to coordinate the industry to come up with a better way of doing things.

Until this takes full effect, ORR requires all train companies to supply specific data on any ‘resource availability shortage pre-cancellations’. ORR will publish this data alongside official statistics in the future, ensuring full public transparency.